I was made aware of the new 21 Savage album two weekends ago when a midsize Toyota pulled up to a Christmas tree lot pumping “Where You From,” the opening track on “What Happened to the Streets?,” now charting third on the Billboard 200. Grim tune, but hearing it this way flooded my brain with happiness. Instead of mounting an algorithmic ambush in digital space, a marquee rap release had found me by chance in the December cold, where the strange mélange of blue spruce and Camry exhaust smelled far more appealing than chestnuts on an open fire. “Ain’t a corner that we ain’t been,” 21 Savage bragged of his public omnipresence, as if having sent this emissary to the tree lot to flex on Santa himself.
The setting wasn’t lost on me. We rarely discuss December rap releases as the stuff of holiday ritual, but any rap recording that lands after the year’s best-of lists have been penned and published should register as a gesture of self-assurance, magnanimity and cool. Rappers who push new music into this dead zone aren’t concerned with critical affirmation or prestige. For them, a December drop is a statement. For us, it’s a reminder that confident music sounds particularly potent in the quiet between Christmas and New Year’s. Listening is a way to fill those silences with something loud and detailed — music that demands a level of attention that the empty days at the end of the calendar allow.
We learned this lesson — thrillingly, permanently — when Playboi Carti’s “Whole Lotta Red” fell from the sky on Christmas night 2020, unannounced and unexplained. Rapping about the gods and vampires that populate the multitiered Twilight Zones of his imagination, Carti sounded like a maximalist pushing toward a new frontier of everythingness — so it makes sense that, in addition to remaining the greatest rap album of the 2020s, “Whole Lotta Red” still feels like Christmas music, too.
With no telling what might still fall down the chimney before the year’s end, the most exciting new rap music to materialize this December has to be “Soulja Hate Repellant,” the latest from Niontay. He’s a New York transplant with roots in Wisconsin and Florida, and he navigates metered rhythm with an appropriate waywardness, scrambling the clock everywhere he goes. “Soulja Hate Repellant” is 14-minutes shorter than “Fada<3of$,” another terrific bundle of songs that Niontay dropped back in April, but this one feels like a longer, stranger trip, everything verbalized in stylish sleep talk, as if in communion with some faraway dream world.
Far faraway. When fellow vanguardist and co-signer Earl Sweatshirt shows up for an Auto-Tuned guest spot on “Cressidaway/Tpgeek,” his only option is to play the straight man. Yet here and throughout, Niontay manages to get twitchy with his phrasing without ruffling the serenity of his timbre — a trick that allows him to withhold emotion while generating a surplus of mood. Check out how he renounces the “sentimental,” in a cool smear of syllables during “100days100nights,” drawling away in his distinctive, lopsided, tumbleweed flow.
With the beat at his back, it’s as if Niontay needs these songs to shove him into the present moment. And at this particular moment on the calendar, we’re sensitive to that kind of temporal push and pull. These are special hours that can sag or hurry, drag or vanish. Some call it the most wonderful time of the year.
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